The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for managing messages. In particular, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for managing messages inputted by multiple users or through multiple apparatuses.
Nowadays, many people use chat as a means of real-time communication with others in various situations. In a chat, a conversation is established in such a way that two or more participants individually input utterances and share a log of the utterances displayed chronologically. In such a chat, since utterances are inputted asynchronously, the utterances are not necessarily arranged in semantic units in a chronological log. For this reason, it is difficult to follow the flow of conversation in some cases, causing difficulty in understanding the conversation and misunderstanding. Such situations are particularly likely to occur when three or more participants are involved or in a fast-paced conversation.
In light of these situations, there have been proposed techniques for displaying utterances in a chat so that relationships between the utterances would easily be understood (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-288102 (Patent Literature 1), Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-117849 (Patent Literature 2), and Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2000-330913 (Patent Literature 3)).
In Patent Literature 1, utterance data are displayed as follows. Specifically, when a user makes an utterance in response to an utterance by a speaker A, utterance data is transmitted with an identifier added thereto, the identifier specifying the speaker A or data on the utterance by the speaker A. When the transmitted utterance data is received, the identifier added to the received utterance data is identified, and thereby the utterance data is displayed in a display manner matched with that used for the past utterance corresponding to the received utterance data.
In Patent Literature 2, for example, a conversation on a topic related to a car is held in an upper left area on a screen, while a conversation on a topic related to a personal computer is held in a lower right area on the screen. In this way, mixing-up of the two topics is avoided. This enables a chat in which a group of utterances for each topic or the like can be visually identified on the screen.
In Patent Literature 3, when a time gap between two utterances is 10 minutes or longer, a ruled line is displayed between the utterances. This makes it easier to recognize related utterances as a single utterance group.